Hardhood NPM | npm.io

Hardhood

A wrapper around hardhat to safely manage encrypted private keys

Why Hardhood?

Hardhat is a fantastic tool. The problem is that it does not manage private keys. So, users put their keys in git-ignored .env files. That is very risky, because if someone changes the .gitignore the private keys can be exposed. Also, despite being in a git-ignored file, those private keys live on the hard drive, in plain text. That sounds terrifying to me.

Hardhood is a simple wrapper around Hardhat that tries to solve the issue.

Configuration

In the common scenario, you have an .env file with private keys. To not change the approach, Hardhood introduces env variables called HARDHOOD_OWNER, HARDHOOD_VALIDATOR, etc. which are generated dynamically and passed to the hardhat-config.js.

So, let's say you have in your .env file the private key of Hardhat's accounts0:

PRIVATE_KEY=ac0974bec39a17e36ba4a6b4d238ff944bacb478cbed5efcae784d7bf4f2ff80

You can modify your hardhat-config.js file, setting private keys like:

    ...
    ropsten: {
      url: `https://ropsten.infura.io/v3/${process.env.INFURA_API_KEY}`,
      accounts: [process.env.HARDHOOD_OWNER || process.env.PRIVATE_KEY],
      chainId: 3
    },
    ...

If you now launch it with Hardhat, the env variable PRIVATE_KEY will be used. But, if you launch it with Hardhood, HARDHOOD_OWNER will be used instead.

Multiple keys

To configure multiple keys, you can set up the config like

    ...
    ropsten: {
      url: `https://ropsten.infura.io/v3/${process.env.INFURA_API_KEY}`,
      accounts: [
        process.env.HARDHOOD_OWNER || process.env.PRIVATE_KEY,
        process.env.HARDHOOD_VALIDATOR,
        process.env.HARDHOOD_DAO
      ],
      chainId: 3
    },
    ...

Install

As always:

npm install -g hardhood

Usage

Set up a new private key called owner with

hardhood -n owner

Notice, that the string owner will be uppercased and used for the env variable. In this case, it will generate HARDHOOD_OWNER.

Hardhood will ask for the key, then for the password to encrypt it. Finally it will save the encrypted private key in ~/.hardhood/[name-or-project].json.

Suppose that you have to launch

npx hardhat run scripts/deploy-pool.js --network mainnet

You can now launch instead

hardhood -u owner run scripts/deploy-pool.js --network mainnet

Hardhood will look for the encrypted private key, retrieve it and ask for the password you used to encrypt it. Then, it runs the hardhat script.

Multiple keys

If the script requires multiple keys, you can call it like

hardhood -u contractOwner,validator,operator run scripts/deploy-pool.js --network mainnet

In this case it will expect 3 different passwords for the 3 different private keys. However, if you used the same password for all of them, you can press enter at the second and third request; then, Hardhood will try to use the first password for all the keys.

Cleaning

To delete an existing keys, launch something like

hardhood -d validator,operator

To reset the project and remove all the keys, launch

hardhood -r

About security

Hardhood uses the package @secrez/crypto from Secrez https://github.com/secrez/secrez

Help

If you run hardhood without parameters, a help screen will be displayed:

Welcome to Hardhood v0.1.0
A wrapper around hardhat to safely manage encrypted private keys

For help look at
https://github.com/secrez/hardhood#readme

Options:
  -n, --new  [key]            Add a new key for current project
  -u, --use  [keys] [cmd]     Use the listed keys (separated by comma) to run the command
  --delete [keys]             Delete the listed keys
  --reset                     Delete all the keys for the current project
  -l, --list                  List the keys' names for the current project